Archive for February, 2014

Earning an IIBA® professional certification offers many benefits to both the individual and the organization employing or engaging them.
Benefits to the individual may include
• Competence in the principles and practices of business analysis.
• Participation in a recognized professional group.
• Recognition of professional competence by professional peers and management.
• Advanced career potential due to recognition as a professional business analysis practitioner.
• Personal satisfaction of accomplishing a milestone in their BA careers.
• Certification can improve overall performance, remove uncertainty and widen market opportunities.
• The process of achieving and maintaining certification helps ensure you are continually improving and refining your activities.
• Potentially higher income for being formally recognized as an experienced BA professional. Recognizes individuals who have invested in their BA careers and encourages them to keep doing so.
Benefits to the organization may include
• Provides professional development, advancement and recognition opportunities for staff.
• Demonstrates to customers, competitors, suppliers, staff and investors that you use industry-standard business analysis practices.
• Demonstrates to your stakeholders that your business is run effectively.
• The regular assessment process will improve staff responsibility, commitment and motivation.
• Establishment and implementation of business analysis practices as outlined in A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge® (BABOK®) Guide by individuals recognized as being knowledgeable and skilled.
• More reliable, higher quality results produced with increased efficiency and consistency by BA professionals who use industry standard BA techniques.
• Identification of professional business analysts to clients and business partners.
• Demonstrated commitment to the field of business analysis, increasingly recognized as a vital component of any successful project.

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More than 225 million people use LinkedIn, not everyone knows how to use it most effectively. According to career experts, job searchers particularly put themselves behind the eight ball when they under use or misuse the tool.

“Many recruiters and hiring managers are now using LinkedIn as their No. 1 method of sourcing talent, so job seekers who have a presence on the site are far more likely to be noticed (and contacted) by HR professionals,”

“It’s essential to use LinkedIn correctly — so if you don’t know what you’re doing with your career/life and you have a disorganized, irrelevant profile, you should understand that you’re broadcasting to everyone that you don’t know what you want, or what you’re doing,”

Here are five tips about how to use LinkedIn to help your career, not hurt it:

Expand your profile. Many people treat their LinkedIn profile as simply a place to post their résumé online. Yet your profile offers the opportunity to provide recruiters and prospective employers with a much more comprehensive impression of your experience — as well as more flexibility — than a standard résumé. “It shouldn’t just be a cut and paste of your résumé, but it should be accurate and consistent.. “For example, you might be seeking an industry change. In the summary section, consider putting the emphasis on transferable skills and drawing attention to your areas of expertise. You can also post projects, samples of work, testimonials, etc.”

Use keywords. Not everyone knows it, but most recruiters and hiring managers who search for candidates on LinkedIn do so largely through a keyword search. That means you should pay special attention to words and titles when writing your profile. “If you are an outside sales professional and your profile uses that exact terminology, you may also want to use terms like ‘business development’ or ‘relationship building’ somewhere in your text, because it’s possible that a recruiter would use those keywords in their search instead of outside sales,”. “In other words, give some real thought to synonymous titles and terms, and utilize them in your profile. The more effectively you can do this, the more likely you will be to appear in someone’s search results.”Help people to “get you.” One of the main purposes for using LinkedIn is to introduce yourself to professional contacts and potential employers before they meet you in person. That means one of your goals in creating an effective LinkedIn presence should be to “channel” yourself, so to speak, onto your profile page — particularly in your summary section.
“A stranger should be able to read your concise summary and get you, and be able to imagine how you could benefit his or her team,”. “If you have received awards in school or at work, speak foreign languages, worked on big name projects: all of that should be covered in your summary in an organized, narrative flow. Some people think that they’ll save that for the Experience section, but if you don’t give people a reason to read your experience, they won’t.”

Link widely. Without a goal in mind for the number and types of contacts you should target, it’s difficult to take steps to make it happen. Goodfellow advises LinkedIn users to aim for more than 250 contacts. Join groups to grow your connections quickly, as doing so gives you that first level of access in each group.”
“Remember that the more you build your network, the more accessible you will be to others, and vice-versa,” she says. “So, think about professional connections (co-workers, former co-workers, etc.) as well as personal friends, former classmates and so on. You never know where a good lead will come from, so don’t be shy about reaching out.”

Seek expert help. Not everyone enjoys marketing themselves, either in person or online. Many women in particular find it difficult to sell themselves on LinkedIn, perhaps because they feel judged or inferior. If this is the case for you, it can pay dividends to overcome this challenge. “LinkedIn only works if you have the confidence in yourself to sell,”
Regardless of whether you do it yourself or call in reinforcements, it’s smart to take steps to improve your approach. “Unless you just love the added challenge of not being on LinkedIn,” “Dedicate time to update your profile.”

After the huge success of the previous Batch of Interview Workshop IIBS is happy to announce next Session of 20 Hour Interview Preparation Workshop for all SAP certified students as per the below schedule: